Java

Since Java came out in 1995, it has grown to be one of the most commonly-used languages in the enterprise world. Compiled into an efficient bytecode, it can run on a wide range of platforms, and has both proprietary and open-source compilers and runtimes. With the creation of the J2ME platform, Java became popular as a language for mobile-device development before smartphones became common, but it really came into its own when Google adopted it in its Dalvik runtime for Android smartphones.

At Parthenon, Android is where we usually use Java the most, but Java is useful in some other scenarios as well. Java is more verbose than script-based languages, and development takes longer, so websites are usually written in scripting languages such as PHP and Python nowadays rather than Java. But it is also faster and has a more efficient memory allocation system, and also has a huge range of libraries available to it. For this reason, we have occasionally used Java to create service layers that link a website with processes that cannot easily or efficiently be created in the website's native language, especially when the processes require long-running preservation of state and real-time
behavior.